New Year's Eve celebrations are drunken affairs that end in disappointment - better to curl up at home with auld reliable Jools Holland, writes Róisín Ingle.
Staring down the great white telephone in a Birmingham pub as the bells rang out one New Year's Eve circa 1989, I made a resolution which turned out to be one of the few I have since kept. Give or take a millennium. Emerging from a grotty bathroom, cider-stained and vomit-splashed, to a scene of mass snogging and over-emotional hugging, I resolved never again to bother with New Year's Eve. Auld Lang Syne? Pshaw! Watching the boyo I fancied get his sixth celebratory snog from a girl who wasn't me, I promised myself I would never again endure another empty celebration of that anti- climactic moment when December turns into January. Never again would I order a decidedly superfluous cider and blackcurrant while usually sane people succumbed to hysteria, spraying kisses around the room like bullets launched from a tipsy machine-gun.
I hate New Year's Eve. At least, I hate those Public Displays of New Year's Eve. I'm allergic to the assumption, made by those who make lavish plans for this night out to end all nights out, that I must love it too because, well, doesn't everyone? Well, no, actually. "What are you doing for New Year's Eve?" must be one of the most annoying questions in the English language, although it sounds pretty irritating in French too. ("Que faites-vous pour la veille de nouvelle année?") What am I doing, mon cher? None of your business. Oh, all right then - if you must know, what I'll mostly be doing is avoiding people who think that New Year's Eve means an automatic and expensive celebration in a room filled with some friends but mostly a bunch of strangers whose auld acquaintance couldn't possibly be forgotten. That's if they manage to remember their names the next morning.
FOR THE PAST 15 years or so I have mostly kept that resolution to stay away from Public Displays of New Year's Eve celebrations. One of the rare occasions I ventured outside to partake in the "festivities" was millennium eve. I blame Prince. I'd been listening to his seminal song for years, and the line "tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999" was so embedded in my brain that to stay in and watch TV - my usual New Year's activity - when it actually was 1999 appeared to spit in the face of a party hyped up for more than a decade by the Purple One. Bet he had a better time, though. I ended up in the freezing cold in Dublin's Merrion Square plying an ex and myself with free drink and begging him to take me back to his place. My last memory of 1999 is of him walking away from me down Baggot Street. My first memory of 2000 is sitting with only a kebab for company alone on some restaurant steps.
No surprise then that the last few New Year's Eves have been private affairs. The early evenings are spent cooking a feast of favourite foods before retiring to the sitting-room to drink champagne and watch Jools Holland's incomparable Hootenanny on BBC2. At this stage I feel I am intimately acquainted with Jools's mates Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and the rest who always turn up for his shindigs. This is the kind of private New Year's celebration I enjoy, albeit in a voyeuristic fashion. And the music is consistently excellent too, which is not what can be said for most Public Displays of New Year's Eve.
When you go private for New Year's, no one is looking at you every five minutes to check whether you are Having A Good Time. Also, it doesn't matter if you've gone to the toilet when midnight comes because everyone in your company knows - newsflash - that it's just another day. We flick over to laugh at whatever televisual travesty RTÉ has cooked up, and then it's back to Jools and co. When midnight comes, we might go to the door and we might listen for the boats blasting their horns because somehow I don't feel as nauseated by the honourable horns as I do by the cheesy bells. And then we go to bed. It's brill.
I admire one friend who sleeps through the "countdown" every year. She boasts about it and loves the appalled faces of the Public New Year's Eve brigade when they realise she's going to miss all the "fun". I can't quite bring myself to miss it altogether because I like taking a TV tour of the world watching Public Displays of New Year's Eve in Sydney, Paris and London. And of course New York. Which is where I will be tomorrow night, if all goes to plan. I am meeting a crowd of strangers at a place called Blinkie's and then going on an historical walking tour of the Brooklyn Bridge, eating complimentary muffins and chips and sipping champagne from the bottle. I'm told at midnight there'll be spectacular fireworks. (Well, there will be if anyone tries to get me to sing Auld Lang Syne.)